Am I doing this right?

In trying to assess whether or not my romance with Aerie is functional I'm saving every ten minutes or so and checking the romance timer in Shadowkeeper. I understand this to be the "AERIEROMANCE" variable, but so far the value hasn't changed from 326183 since the last dialogue was initiated. Am I correct in assuming this value refers to a quantity of time and that it should decrease as real time progresses? If so, how is it quantified? I've not changed anything in Shadowkeeper.

I hope this is appropriate to the forum and community - I do have several NPC and romance mods installed amongst others - I'm just trying to assess the overall functionality of what I've got (which, FTR, has blown me away! Astounding work!)

The game timer counts up, odd as that sounds. The value you see is the time the next talk will fire.

How it works: You begin the game at time 0. As you play, the timer increases, naturally, but if you leave the game paused, the timer continues to climb. Theoretically, you could just pause the game, go out with some friends for the evening, unpause the game when you got back, and the next talk would fire.

Must. Write. Faster.

cmorgan: "None of us get old around here, just more proficient at doing more stuff with less braincells!"

Ahah, gotcha! Apologies if this has been answered before. I scoured this site amongst many others with Google using all the terms in all the combinations I could think of and came up empty, I'm afraid!

And yeah, I was aware it counts down in realtime... I just thought the variable was a quantity of it that should've decreased as realtime went by (hence my pausing every so often, saving and checking it in Shadowkeeper).

It took me forever to figure out that timers in i.e. games are like throwing a pin in a map, and then walking towards it. I read and reread the IESDP entries, and could never quite get it. Seeing a timer value never change kept me thinking my game was broken. I don't know when it finally clicked that all the 'timers' really are single-value globals that the game checks against using its own internal counter - the same ones that show passage of game days and passage of real (playing) time since the saved game started. I think it was when I realized that playing time on one save was different from another save, so that kicked my brain into realizing that RealTime and GameTime are all relative to a fixed point.

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by. - Douglas Adams

The game timer counts up, odd as that sounds. The value you see is the time the next talk will fire.

How it works: You begin the game at time 0. As you play, the timer increases, naturally, but if you leave the game paused, the timer continues to climb. Theoretically, you could just pause the game, go out with some friends for the evening, unpause the game when you got back, and the next talk would fire.

Or you could just find something else to do for the next 15-60 minutes, seeing how most timed romance talks have around that amount of time between talks. Unless something else needs to happen, such as a rest, a quest triggering, required to be in a certain area, daytime/nighttime, etc.